The present disclosure relates to an image acquisition apparatus, an image acquisition method, and an information processing program for acquiring an image using a microscope.
From the past, in a digital microscope apparatus, an entire prepared slide (slide) on which a pathological sample is mounted has been photographed using a microscope and converted into a digital image of the slide (see, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2011-137780 (hereinafter, referred to as Patent Document 1); note that in the technique disclosed in Patent Document 1, a lesion area is searched for at a low magnification, and the magnification is raised stepwise after that like the method for a pathological diagnosis of the related art that uses a microscope).
However, microscopically photographing the entire slide takes time, and a data amount of the photographed image has been enormous.
In this regard, in the digital microscope apparatus, in microscopically photographing a slide, an area to be microscopically photographed has been limited to an area including a pathological sample for reducing time required for the photographing and an image data mount.
For limiting the area, the digital microscope apparatus first performs macro-photographing of the entire slide. Then, based on a thumbnail image as the entire image obtained by the macro-photographing, the digital microscope apparatus sections the thumbnail image into sectional areas as sections obtained by a single microscopic photographing, and judges whether an image of a pathological sample is present for each section.
Then, the digital microscope apparatus microscopically photographs only the sectional area judged to be including an image of the pathological sample. As a result, time required for the photographing and the image data amount are cut.
The most important process out of the procedure described above is the process of judging whether there is an image of the pathological sample in the sectional areas. This judgment is made using a luminance value of pixels in the sectional areas as an index or using an edge component index value obtained by detecting an edge in the sectional areas as an index (see, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2012-8100).